How to Make Great Data Visualisations
April 28, 2025
What makes a great data visualisation?
One thing’s for sure: it’s never a pie chart…
Healy (2018) Data Visualization: A Practical Introduction. Princeton University Press.
- General discussion on commong issues regarding data visualizations
- Applications to social sciences
- Focus on R package
ggplot2(Wickham, 2016)
Why visualizing data?
- Exploring your data (identifying patterns and problems, etc…)
- Extract information intuitively, efficiently, and accurately
- Discovering relationships in your data
- Communicating information with precision, in a concise way
- Displaying your main results
- More sociological dimensions: bolster credibility
- … but, it is not sufficient to “look at data” for good analysis, and anyway, it comes with some risks
Edward Tufte’s main principle
Graphical excellence is the well-designed presentation of interesting data—a matter of substance, of statistics, and of design. … [It] consists of complex ideas communicated with clarity, precision, and efficiency. … [It] is that which gives to the viewer the greatest number of ideas in the shortest time with the least ink in the smallest space. … [It] is nearly always multivariate. … And graphical excellence requires telling the truth about the data. (Tufte, 1983, p. 53)
